I've seen people rip me in other threads for how Andalusians got to the New World,
"Stop writing your history fanfic it's unrealistic"
I wonder if that's more a Before 1900 board attitude or an After 1900 one. I guess with better and better documentation about what is or isn't possible it's easier to forget AH is primarily a thought experiment. Also, you know, a story people write and read for free. Because it's fun or something.
Anyways you're absolutely correct, the only way you wouldn't be is if the Andalusis were not crossing the Atlantic Equator to begin with-- there would be no voyages to Africa where you could swing wide and end up in Brazil. But the basis for that is already provided by better ships + trade partners in Africa.
Meanwhile, if you're colonizing from East Asia, you have a colossal Pacific Ocean in front of you, and once you cross that you wind up with a strip of land backed up onto the Rockies that doesn't have quite as much to offer as, say, the Caribbean.
If the Wu still want to settle the north, that means putting increasing amount of Chinese into a cold place where they'll want fur coats. They can get those out of Siberia, but after overexploiting that (there's also European demand through Russia) the next stop, as for the OTL Russians, is Alaska. The result doesn't have to be settler colonialism but it will still be colonialism.
Manchuria is another example of the thing I referred to where "Chinese colonization" would really be "people from a particular province moving to a similar environment". "Swallows and Settlers" describes how the Chinese movement there was mostly from Shandong, and a lot of it was temporary/seasonal until the early 20th century.
African colonization is not a given - there will be some, perhaps, but the Scramble for Africa arose from fairly unique and specific circumstances that will almost certainly not exist in every timeline.
Well, either the Europeans scramble for Africa or coastal Africans scramble for their own hinterlands-- the Latin American model. Maya movements for autonomy and justice in the 1800s and 1900s were put down by Mexicans and Guatemalans, not "Spanish". The societies left behind by an incomplete and patchy Spanish conquest marshaled their resources to finish the job that was started. The Southern Cone was subjugated by Chileans and Argentinians. That's just what these states had to do to keep up with world demand, both for their products and the demand that these states be "respectable" and police/expand their borders. If they failed, then the US or Europe would just do it for them.
This is more or less what was happening in Africa before the Scramble. The Khedives of Egypt bringing Sudan under Egyptian governance for the first time in millennia probably. Zanzibar sending Tippu Tip out to the eastern Congo. Ethiopia attaining its greatest territorial extent ever. If it continues in Africa, well maybe instead of the Argentine/Brazilian naval arms race it'll be the Zanzibari/Ethiopian one. Wonder what African Peron or Vargas would be like.
Me personally, I'd prefer bucking the trope of "big Ethiopia", in favor of something like the Armenian medieval and early modern situation of autonomous highland populations within a Muslim (Egyptian, Sudanese, Oromo, Somali) imperial state, or several. "Hey but maybe things don't have to go *just like Armenia*" they don't have to, but maybe they do, the world will only get more bloody from here on out.
The Hussenids caused a period of chaos across the heart of West Africa as the Kanuri, Kanembu, Zarma, and other peoples migrated from Lake Chad and towards the west.
Don't think they had guns. If they're slow to adopt them, even with the headstart they'll end up like the Luba and Lunda in the next wave of chaos, or the one after that. "The Gun In Central Africa" describes firearms as symbolic tools of power appropriated by all, but also "guns" in the aggregate as something that could invalidate the advantage of centuries of social organization, giving a more "backward" group like the Chokwe an advantage. Well, the Chokwe ended up taking after Lunda customs. Who knows where that would have gone without the Scramble.
I believe I discussed in an earlier speculative post how regions like West Africa and Central Africa are likely to be thoroughly gutted by the slave trade, but I didn't even take into account that the majority of those enslaved are likely to be women. I think "ravage" is going to be an understatement when certain ethnic groups are going to be decimated by centuries of constant raiding and enslavement by Muslim or even Christian slavers that are going to be carrying deadlier weapons and an increasing desire to acquire more people for domestic servitude/labor.
Certain ethnic groups are losing women, but the other ethnic groups are taking them as wives. It's a loss for Africa in general but it's not all going down the drain [into Eurasia or the Americas], what's left after Eurasia takes its cut is just concentrated into the winning African entities. Eurasians don't want to come in with deadly weapons, they'll just die of malaria. Better to stay on the coast, get rich, and let Dahomey or another neighbor do the work. And Dahomey prospers, the Ashanti prosper, etc etc
might resemble a lot like the U.S. settler colonization of the 1800s, where settlers, traveling by horse and steam locomotives, are eager to take advantage of the abundant resources of the region, especially once they discover the presence of gold (which is why I suggested the name al-Jannah for alt-California since it means paradise or heaven).
Think we're smashing a lot of different events together. Trains didn't extend to California until a generation after the gold rush, people went by wagon or ships around Cape Horn/portage across Panama, no Canal yet.
The genocide itself had distinct phases. It covered the whole of California after the gold rush. But before that, you had Spanish and Mexican Alta California, in which natives definitely suffered abuses in the missions (leading to revolt, then suppression of the same), but they were only in the missions to begin with because all the new cows and horses ate all the grasses and seeds, even the human-edible ones (it's what cows are built for, and they do it better than people). The ranching economy outside meant security and sustenance could only be found in the missions, which did in the end deliver on the promise of, well, keeping Natives alive, and through negotiation and struggle they could preserve their sense of themselves as a people. Not only that, but old Californio ranching society stuck to the coasts, didn't venture into the Central Valley where they would have found gold. And there weren't too many people to begin with, because the irrigation that sucks the West dry to hydrate the coast didn't exist. Ranching made do with the resources available to it, and the missions were a safe zone from that. No more reason to harass them, except sadism.The attacks on that intensified after Mexico's dissolution of the missions (the ranching economy is now everywhere) and then the gold rush.
I also wonder if the "gold rush" as a concept would emerge in different circumstances. You could consider it a essentially Anglosphere phenomenon-- free migration in a world of widespread individual land ownership (and dispossession) through enclosure and private property rights, news spreading in English through a world of English or adjacent populations, shipping lines eager to promote rumors in order to get more fare-paying customers, and most importantly destination governments that actually want all those migrants. The typical "gold rushes" are in places like California, western Canada/Alaska, Australia, and the South African Boer Republics. The former three wanted a big beautiful Anglo population and also plenty of Chinese to do the work of building railroads and such. The Boer Republics didn't necessarily want Anglos but the "Boer" Republics always had the problem of too few actual Boers, they were perpetually in need of labor for their agrarian ethnostates, which meant they needed not only Anglos and Chinese but black Africans (locals and immigrants) as well. In a situation where Atlantic-facing North America is, for example, divided among more antagonistic powers, it's possible none of them have the leisure to think about "sea from shining sea". That kind of territory may not even be defensible, depending on how mangled and unstable the eastern borders are.
In the end, California was not built by the "gold rush". The real gold was the migrants-- a whole industry sprung up to supply them with goods and services and the labor demand just brought more people in. If anything, the railroad was a disaster-- it broke this racket by letting American goods be exported west more easily, and it actually led to a depression in SF (and then the people who hoped the railroad would make them all rich blamed the Chinese when that didn't happen). SF ditched its old autarkic industry and built a new economy around being America's Pacific port, and manufacturing associated with that. But a lot of the richest people around were the same who, rather than panning for gold, sold miners their pans and lamps.
But on the other hand, if you have a population of mostly locals who want to keep it that way, even if it means slower development, they can pretty easily prevent a gold rush... or more accurately, make sure the gold rush only involves locals. It's possible to imagine a system where the mission-and-rancho society is extended through all of California-- once gold is discovered there will be more incentive to break the rules of the "contract" the natives are coerced into (kill them for their land, or kill them specifically to piss off the missions who you think are trying to claim all the gold for themselves). But if there aren't quite so many migrants it may be easier to restrain them, and to keep the Natives around in... well, reservations. That's what the missions were. With all the disadvantages that come from "autonomy" being dependent on corrupt self appointed agents who decide what your rations are.
